Hi, i thought here is the bestplace to ask about this, is it possible to make new friends on here, what is the most effective way, tell me your experience
You do it like you do everywhere else. You strike up a conversation. Lemmy has DMs.
The most effective way is not to mention AI.
Other people have pointed out how lemmy isn’t designed for this.
I’d say, however, you could join a justchat type of community or make your own. These people probably still won’t come to your wedding but you can have friendly conversations.
You won’t. Or if I look at it from the more positive side: you’d be very very very lucky to make a friend here.
This platform is based on making anonymous accounts and one off comment interactions. There are hardly any tools for adding people to your familiar group, or prioritise seeing their posts or making a small intimate group… It is hard coded into the platform to have these sorts of interactions. It doesn’t matter that you’ve got intentions of deeper interaction if others don’t. Sometimes people here express an interest in chatting with others. I’ve tried twice making a chat group so people could join and chat. One person did, and even then it is very difficult to keep a chat conversation going and to build any connection like that when you likely have no shared interests or experiences.
I’ve had better luck on Reddit (this was 15 years ago) with looking for the local meetups in my city’s subreddit. It was offputting to meet a bunch of people who just wanted to regurgitate memes IRL, but there would always be a small number of pleasant people to exchange numbers with and carry on hanging out with. But this took effort. Lemmy doesn’t have the numbers to have big enough local groups.
This is all on the backdrop of community and friendship being hard to come by universally. Society is more insular and isolated than ever. Friendships aren’t going to come from the comfort of an armchair at home. I’m keen to make friends as well, but I k ow it’s not going to happen here and I’m going to as many work socials and friends of friends hangouts as possible; and I’m looking for some group or class to join locally as well. I would suggest the same to you.
I’d totally go out for coffee if I found out somebody on here lived near me. Probably not the smartest idea in the world, but the novelty would be hard to resist. The whole fediverse is so niche that sometimes it’s hard to remember y’all actually live somewhere lol
I have only ever met up with forum people (all bikers) rather than Reddit/Lemmy people. Works best with well-frequented but still niche interests.
But might work okay if you can find a community or instance that is purely from your local area but it’s still pretty small on here and it’s unlikely you’ll find too many local people in a niche interest community
Overall, it’s easy to find lemmy friends. People that you’ll recognize, have conversations with, come to enjoy talking to on lemmy/the fediverse.
But, like any online community, there’s a barrier to cross if you expect to be friends elsewhere. It’s relatively easy to run across folks that will chat on discord or matrix. Harder to find people willing to deanonymize any more than that.
As an example, I’m on the paranoid end of things. I haven’t given my real name out online since maybe 2003? Ish. Since then there’s exactly two people that have crossed from a forum to a full friend. One was from here, lemmy in specific. The other is my wife now, and even that took a year or so to become a friendship back in the mid aughts where I disclosed more than name and general location.
But! There’s been plenty of people on the fediverse that I consider friends to some degree or another. Folks that, even when we disagree, I respect and look forward to interacting with.
My whole recipe for making friends at all, in any context, applies here. Be open to people. Extend trust carefully, but with hope. Accept people for who they are within a given range of acceptability (I ain’t hanging with a Nazi, as an extreme example). The rest is just staying chill, being yourself, and letting things develop naturally.
It’s kinda funny though. My friend I met here? Feels like I’ve known him forever, but it’s only been over a year and a half or so. He went from this rando in a fun conversation to one of the best friends I’ve ever had. Dude knows my wife’s name, my address, my kid’s name. I’ve sent him pictures of me, and I don’t even do that with relatives (though, in honesty it was a temporary thing because I don’t trust any messaging service enough to not delete such things).
So it’s possible for sure. Thing with friendship is that you can never force it if you want it to be real and last. Online or meatspace.
Hey,
It’s been a while I haven’t replied under one of your comment, hope everything is well on your side!
Good enough :)
How you been?
All good, thanks! A bit busy with life (in a good way), but now trying to get back to the Fedi for a bit
How do you even start this on lemmy? You have an interesting conversation with someone in a thread and then just send them a message to keep talking? It feels like most people would think you’re a bot.
Well, generally you’d want to have a couple of interactions in comments before sending a dm, or a fairly lengthy one.
It’s really similar to meatspace tbh. You wouldn’t really give your number to a rando in the checkout line, but if you ended up having a really good conversation, you might ask if they want to exchange numbers. Otherwise, you’d wait until you’d had a few conversations before suggesting a get together.
There’s a degree of vibe reading necessary though. It’s a lot harder for folks that haven’t had a lot of social experience, or have some kind of difficulties reading cues. Unfortunately, you can’t see someone checking their watch or shuffling their feet online, but there’s the benefit that nobody is really obligated to respond the way in person interaction tends to feel s pressure to make a polite exit.
I’d say that as long as you approach it right, even a short interaction is okay to build from via DM for the same reason. If you lead with something making it clear you’re not looking to apply social pressure, the worst that’ll happen is a lack of response 99/100. You know, the usual “hope it’s okay to message, feel free to ignore this if it isn’t” kind of thing.
Makes sense I guess. I tend to see comment threads as one-off things and don’t pay much attention to usernames. Maybe when you comment more you end up interacting with the same people eventually and if you’re lucky they’ll remember you too.
It’s a bit hard to compare this to outside life as I don’t tend to have conversations with strangers. But some people do, so it must work well sometimes.
I would probably stick to comments at first. If you regularly come to a community, you’ll probably see the same people in most of the posts.
I don’t think it is a good place to make friends…
Wow. I can’t believe you would say this. I thought we had something special.
Indeed, I’ve somehow made quite a few enemies.
Well, they actually made themselves. Some people just like to get bent out of shape.
Yeah, I seem to spend half of my time here responding to killjoy puritanical misanthropes, which likely says more about me than I’d like to admit.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s many interesting and intelligent folk here, I’m just not sure it’s the best place to find a pal.
Bring some pastry and food, a couple or beers or cokes, and you make friends.
Jokes apart, I made one real life friend on Lemmy, we even met once, he lives in my country but a bit far away.
Yeah it’s not really much of a thing here, I think. I mean it’s possible, but mostly it’s linkspam with occasional banter added.
I mean, no one I talked to on here really ended up lasting more than like… 3 days
But you might have better luck, who knows :p
Asking people out for coffee when you find out they live in your area does not work, even if they’re on lemmy asking for advice on how to make friends since they’re new to the city. It was the only time I tried so its the only relevant advice I had to give.
